The PTC Arbortext environment supports three publishing engines which generate output from a preview or publishing action requested from Arbortext Editor, Arbortext Styler, or Arbortext Publishing Engine:

You have the option to set the effective print engine for your environment. This applies to a local system using Arbortext Editor and Arbortext Styler as well as to an Arbortext PE server if you are using Arbortext Publishing Engine for publishing documents. Refer to Logic for print engine selection for information on setting and using the publishing engines. Which publishing engine you choose depends on the content of your document, its stylesheet type, the publishing type, the final output format required, and your particular area of expertise if you wish to extend your stylesheet with source edits. To assist you in your decision, a brief description of each engine follows.

The following effective print engine setting applies to Arbortext Styler stylesheets:

The PTC Arbortext Layout Developer (PTC ALD) print engine is included in installations of Arbortext Styler and Arbortext Publishing Engine. It is not available if you install Arbortext Editor without one of these additional components. It extends the functionality available from an Arbortext Styler stylesheet, by providing access to PTC ALD's capabilities for formatting and printing documents that contain text in languages other than the standard Latin languages, for example Thai, Hebrew, and Arabic, as well as those in the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK) group.

You may select this engine to support preview or publishing to print or PDF formats. The PTC ALD engine does not support HTML, Web or RTF outputs.

Please refer to Arbortext Styler help for further information, paying particular reference to the following:

The FOSI publishing engine is a component of Arbortext Publishing Engine. It uses stylesheets that conform to the Formatting Output Specification Instance standard (MIL-PRF-28001) to describe the formatted output of an SGML or XML document. A FOSI is itself an SGML or XML document. The same technology is used to display documents in Arbortext Editor.

Highlights of the capabilities of the FOSI engine that may mean you would like to select it in support of your publishing actions are listed below:

Please refer to the FOSI Reference for further information.

The XSL-FO composition pipeline uses style sheets that conform to the W3C XSL 1.1 Recommendation to describe how to format an XML document. When publishing to XSL-FO with a .style stylesheet, the .style file is automatically converted into an xsl-fo stylesheet, which is then used to continue the publishing process.

XSL-FO is a public specification, and as such there are ways to use the engine to achieve effects that Arbortext Styler does not expose. For example, the transformation part of the specification (XSL) is very powerful. Since Arbortext Styler provides the ability to export your stylesheet to XSL-FO you may carry out document production without being tied to the PTC Arbortext publishing system.

For ease of reference, a summary of the publishing engine capabilities described in the preceding sections is given in the table below: